And so far FTL has become that game that I HAVE to play before I do anything. Very simple but wonderful little game. Trine 2 is bringing out the little girl clutching a cheesy fantasy novel in me as well, which isn't really a bad thing.

Speaking of bringing out that side in me, I'm looking forward to trying out Ubi Art's Child of Light.

I'm about ready for the blocky Minecraft art style to go away now. I'm more than okay with not aiming for photo-realism, but c'mon, there are way more interesting art styles you could be going for. And it's not like it's actually retro; sloped surfaces entered first person games as soon as they took place on more than one plane.

Godus makes me sad. I knew it was Molyneux when I backed the Kickstarter but did it anyway. Lesson is finally well and truly learned.

Basically Godus is a slow-paced barely interactive click-fest about sculpting land for your followers to live on. Maybe it opens up later, but I've got a whole lot of land to sculpt before I get to the point where I find out, and I'm not sure I've got the patience. I haven't even gotten to the bits that require in-app purchase, in a game that costs $20 on Steam, or $30 if you were dumb enough to back it like I did.

Thankfully Volgarr the Viking, Valdis Story, and the LA Gamespace experimental games bundle also came out at various points this week to redeem Kickstarter rewards.

I thought they said there weren't going to be any in-app purchases?! That fuckin' sucks, man. I was almost starting to believe in Godus, watching the videos and all that. I mean, I would enjoy sculpting the land and such but... What you're describing sounds like Bad Juju.

It's an iPad game. Each house generates belief after a short period and you need to manually click each one to get it. You can also build a Settlement, which is a statue that radiates roads a certain distance and automatically harvests all belief from any house in its range, but after the first three Settlement statues costing belief the next require gems. You can find gems in-game, but so far I haven't developed my civilization far enough to enable mining. I also don't know if gems are an infinite resource, if slow to harvest, or limited. But you will be able to buy them in-game once that feature goes live.

So, click on a billion houses to harvest belief to be able to do anything, or build 3 statues to automate it in a few areas, leaving giant chunks of the map uncovered that need manual attention. It's a garbage gameplay mechanic. Remember Warcraft? When you told a peasant to harvest wood or gold he did it and kept doing it until he ran out of resources? Warcraft 1, in 1994, knew having the player waste his time doing this was a stupid idea.

I wonder if a small indie developer would be able to create something a la unnatural selection/ Spore/ One Must Fall. An offline/online arena game were you create your own chimerae and fight other people's creations. Or just create your creatures and let them fight each other. OR play as a Creator and/or Fighter, where Creators gain rep and points by Fighters using their creations in fights. Perhaps not even one-on-one fights, but battles where they choose several creatures to complement each other. THE MIND REELS!